Wednesday, Dec 7, 2016, 12:32 pm · By David Moberg

Involuntary part-time workers usually work about half the hours of full-timers, get lower rates of pay per hour and fewer, if any, benefits. (Fibonacci Blue/ Flickr)

The recovery from the Great Recession has been long, slow and steady. But it has also contributed unexpectedly to an increase in involuntary part-time work, which needs new regulation to protect workers from abuse, according to a new study released this week by the Economic Policy Institute.

Author Lonnie Golden finds that voluntary part-time work has remained more or less stable since 2007, around the start of the recession. But involuntary part-time work has increased by about 18 times the rate of growth of all work, and five times faster than part-time work. Currently, some 6.4 million Americans who want full-time jobs are stuck working part-time hours, according to Golden.

Tuesday, Dec 6, 2016, 4:32 pm · By Joe Conason

Over the past year, Trump has uttered lots of bigger promises that will be much harder to fake than the Carrier deal. (Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post via Getty Images)

Within a day after Donald Trump's triumphal visit to Indiana, where he claimed credit for "saving" 800 jobs at a Carrier factory, the Department of Labor released its first monthly unemployment report since his election victory—and one of the last that will come out during the presidency of Barack Obama.

Together those events illustrated the contrast between a real strategy for economic growth and the dubious gambit of a Twitter addict.

Monday, Dec 5, 2016, 1:49 pm · By Joe Allen

Teamster general president James P. Hoffa managed to hang onto power in the recent international Teamster election—but barely.

He was challenged for general president by Fred Zuckerman and the Teamsters United reform slate. Along with his running mate Tim Sylvester, the former president of New York Local 804, Zuckerman spent the last two years crisscrossing the country meeting with thousands of rank-and-file Teamsters infuriated by sell-out contracts, bankrupt pensions, and cascading corruption scandals.

Besides narrowly losing the election in the United States to Zuckerman by 709 votes, Hoffa lost his “home local” 614 in Pontiac, Michigan, and Detroit Local 299, led for decades by his father Jimmy Hoffa, Sr. Hoffa eked out a win by a mere six thousand votes out of 213,000 cast in the United States and Canada in the closest election in Teamsters’ history.

Back in 1996, Teamsters reformer Ron Carey, the first rank-and-file elected leader of the union who battled and defeated Hoffa and his supporters across the country in a bruising reelection campaign, denounced Hoffa as “an empty suit and a front for the mob.”

Today, he seems not to be wearing any clothes at all. The election results have torn to shreds the foundation of his political machine and may reduce him to a mere figurehead in the union.

Indianapolis, Indiana—As one of their first orders of business, President-elect Donald Trump and Mike Pence, his vice president, helped strike a deal between the Indiana Economic Development Corporation (IEDC) and the Carrier Corporation to keep more than 1,000 jobs at Carrier’s Indianapolis manufacturing plant.

Carrier was a frequent target of Trump during his presidential campaign, in which he promised to protect jobs and penalize companies for leaving the United States. After tweeting about a deal in the works with Carrier on Thanksgiving, Trump and Pence spent the next several days hashing out its parameters before the president-elect announced on Twitter on November 29 that they had reached an agreement. Trump took a victory lap at Carrier’s plant in Indianapolis this week.

Thursday, Dec 1, 2016, 4:22 pm · By David Moberg

A new report from the National Employment Law Project (NELP) credits Fight for $15 with winning an increase of $61.5 billion in annual wages over its first four years. (ROBYN BECK/AFP/Getty Images)

Chicago—The movement known as Fight for $15 started in New York City as a surprise one-day strike. The workers’ demands then were simple and bold. They wanted a minimum wage of $15 an hour and the right to organize a union.

The workers who initiated the campaign could no longer tolerate lengthy debates over penny increases to the state, local and federal minimum wages. They called for more than double the federal minimum wage, which stood then—and now—at $7.25 an hour.

This was a dream that seemed not only aspirational but downright crazy when Fight for $15 first launched. And it was put forward by some of the workers with the greatest need—occupants of the virtually interchangeable jobs of the vast modern low-wage economy. These are the jobs that people take not just as a first job, but as the first of dozens of similar jobs in a career with little progress.

To mark its fourth anniversary this week, the Fight for $15 organization staged its largest and “most disruptive” national action to date, which included strikes, non-violent civil disobedience and actions at major airports like the Chicago O’Hare International Airport.

Even though it still has a long way to go, Fight for $15 had reason to celebrate.

Wednesday, Nov 30, 2016, 12:29 pm · By David Bacon

Malone ignores the active role that immigrant workers have played, in cooperation with others, in organizing in the workplace, and in political action in defense of workers' interests. (Carlos Fernandez/ Flickr)

It is clear in the article that its author, Buzz Malone, feels he is defending the interests of workers against employers. The article's thrust, however, calls for the enforcement of employer sanctions—punishing employers for hiring undocumented workers. I'm writing this letter because, with the election of Donald Trump on the most overtly anti-immigrant platform in decades, the proposals in this article present a greater danger than they would at any other time. In many ways they line up with the kind of immigration enforcement we can expect from the Trump administration.

Tuesday, Nov 29, 2016, 1:13 pm · By Jim Naureckas

Only if we see economic stratification and racial resentment as interrelated—rather than presenting them, as Krugman does, as mutually exclusive explanations—do we have a viable strategy for dealing with either one. (Photo by Mark Makela/Getty Images)

In the wake of a disastrous Election Day, does the Democratic Party need to present economic policies that have more to offer the majority of voters? Don’t bother, argues New York Times columnist Paul Krugman (11/25/16).

Krugman begins by acknowledging what some have denied—that class played some role in what happened on November 8: “What put Donald Trump in striking distance was overwhelming support from whites without college degrees,” he writes. “So what can Democrats do to win back at least some of those voters?”

Wednesday, Nov 23, 2016, 12:46 pm · By Elizabeth Grossman

Occupational health and safety advocates are concerned about what will happen to OSHA’s already small budget under the Trump administration and the new Republican-controlled Congress. (Ianqui Doodle/ Flickr)

On the campaign trail, Donald Trump repeatedly promised to bring back U.S. factory jobs. The message resonated with blue-collar workers and Trump’s success is credited, in large part, to voters who have seen their jobs disappear and livelihoods diminish as U.S. manufacturing companies moved toward automation or just plain moved—to places with lower labor costs, like Mexico. Trump also campaigned on a promise to eliminate regulations, a position now central to his incoming administration’s policies.

Trump’s transition team has said he will introduce a moratorium on new regulations and cancel executive orders and regulations “that kill jobs and bloat government.”

How does Trump’s promise to reduce and eliminate regulations square with creating good, living-wage jobs? How will his presidency affect workplace health and safety? What will happen to the gains made during the Obama administration?

Tuesday, Nov 22, 2016, 6:38 pm · By Michelle Chen

One of Trump's first policy announcements was that he would immediately kill the already-stalled TPP negotiations. (cool revolution/ Flickr)

The one election issue tying together populist voices on the right and left was trade—or so it seemed. Donald Trump’s upset win, fueled in part by Rust Belt rage against free trade deals and globalization, could hand liberals an unexpected opportunity to push a fairer set of trade rules, if they can shift the debate away from Trump's reactionary “bull in a China shop” spectacle and toward a concrete movement to advance a people-centered alternative, based on social-justice principles not return-on-investment.

Friday, Nov 18, 2016, 5:48 pm · By Dave Kamper

Trying to find an ideal “model” is a distraction. Organizing is hard. It is expensive, risky and even in ideal circumstances fails a lot. (SEIU 775/ Flickr)

No one who cares about the future of the American labor can disagree with the conclusion of Jane McAlevey’s new book, No Shortcuts: Organizing for Power in the New Gilded Age.

She calls for a “bottom-up organizing model, one that encourages and equips workers to resist the multifaceted assault on their interests inside and outside the workplace.” That sort of organizing is necessary for unions to survive and thrive, McAlevey writes, outlining both her book’s greatest virtue and its biggest problem. She is right that organizing needs to be what the labor movement does, but wrong in her analysis of why unions aren’t doing enough of it now.